Followers

Saturday, April 21, 2018

Last week, the country lost a great
patriot, one, however, whom most Kenyans had probably never heard of. My
grandmother, Eunice Nyawira, passed away in her hospital bed after a long
illness. Born at the dawn of the colonial era, she lived to see Kenya gain her
independence and the subsequent betrayal of their hopes. She is part of a
generation that is dying out and with them goes a great deal of history, not
just of our family, but also of the nation they leave behind.

These are the ordinary people whose
passing goes unlamented for the most part in a country that reserves its
adulation for its politicians. I did know a great deal about my cucu and I took
her presence for granted, assuming she would always be there to tell her story.
It is something I will regret for the rest of my life.

The current hagiographic
memorialization of Kenneth Matiba and the angst over the fate of electoral
commissioners just makes this loss seem even more severe. History has always
been presented as the tale of a few powerful men and Kenyan history in
particular revolves around the fates of Big Men like Matiba. In this telling,
the experiences and acts of a humble peasant woman in a nondescript corner of what
is now Nyeri county hardly seem to merit more than a few lines in the obituary
pages.

However, it is on the backs of people such as Cucu Nyawira that this
country was built. It is their numerous small acts of resistance – such as when
she confronted colonial officials in Nyeri to get my late mum admitted into
Ngandu Girls, or when she organized food for Mau Mau fighters, for which she
was briefly arrested and detained - that provided the podium on which the Big
Men stood. An illiterate woman who bore and educated 10 kids, who organized her
community to build schools, to create better housing as well as water storage
is exactly the sort of everyday Kenyan we should honor and celebrate daily.

There are millions of unsung heroes
and heroines like her across our land. Ordinary Kenyans who did and continue to
do extraordinary things. They are the rocks upon which families, communities
and nations are founded. Their stories deserve to be collected and shared,
their lives celebrated. They are a valuable store of history and with each loss
of one of their number, that store is irredeemably diminished. While they are
still with us, we should have a nationwide project to collect and document
their stories and their lives. And not just the elderly generation, but all of
Kenya’s generations. Rather than Kenyan history being the story of its Big Men,
we should make it the story of all its people.

I imagine this being a collective
and collaborate effort. No one person or even one organisation could do it. The
Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission took years to interview 40,000
Kenyans. To build a database of the stories of millions would simply be
overwhelming. However, we do have the internet and the unlimited resources that
it provides. If we could get Kenyans to contribute their own stories and those of
their relatives and friends, then we could begin to assemble a massive popular
archive.

And the stories needn’t be solely about superhuman exploits.In fact, the most important contributions
would be the tales of everyday living and survival that would shine a light on
who the Kenyans are and how they experienced history.

I, for example, remember Cucu Nyawira's delight upon learning that Egypt, where, according to the Bible, Jesus' family had fled to to escape persecution, was actually in Africa. Also her patient skepticism when informed that people had walked on the moon. She also told me of granaries Kikuyus used to set aside aside after the harvest specifically for the poor and the disabled, challenging the idea that charity is a thing we learnt from the West.

It would undoubtedly be an extremely ambitious undertaking but one
that I believe would be worth every effort. “In my culture, when the elderly
die natural deaths we throw a big party and sing and dance and trade stories
about the life they lived and the lives they touched,” tweeted political
analyst and author, Nanjala Nyabola, recently. Nothing would be a more fitting
tribute to Eunice Nyawira and the unseen millions like her to whom Kenya owes
everything.